The au courant notion of paying consumers to look at ads strikes me as not dissimilar to the prospect of getting paid to have sex - more observed and talked about than accomplished, less exciting than it sounds, and arguably criminal. Or at the very least, unethical. Web surfers get freeware in exchange for their attention to ad banners all the livelong day. Do they really need to collect tips, as well - like some strange breed of valet shopaholic?
Well, no. And like Long John Silver deep-fry chefs whose paychecks never seem to outdistance the dry-cleaning bills for their eye patches, those who buy into schemes like Netcentives and Cybergold may not know exactly what they're buying into, but they will certainly be buying. In the end, such deals - glistening new cyber context notwithstanding - are the online equivalent of the rebates offered at your local auto lot. They'll cut you a check for $3,000 tomorrow, if you pony up $30K today.
Why not just sell it cheaper? Because then you'd be back to the dilemma of closing a rather mundane sale sans hook, which just isn't as much fun. Instead, services like Cybergold offer instant transfers of two bucks, three-fifty, even five dollars toward your VISA bill, in exchange for nothing more than your trial of Yahoo Internet Life or Wired magazine. Not that you shouldn't try them both out, but the fact that you're asked for your credit-card number up front should be a hint that you're not trying so much as simply buying.
Can such psychological sleights drive a healthy commercial pulse? No, scratch that rhetorical question - why squander our valuable work shirktime belaboring transparent marketing 101isms? Suffice it to say, "free" is a powerful word, and has meant its opposite almost as long as it's been around. Ratcheting up the hard sell from merely free to "free money" sure sounds good. If people find it too good to be true or too true to be good, the resilient concept of involving consumers in information economics will crash and burn. If it instead strikes people as truly good, the only question will be whether they'll be able to take time out of their busy spending schedules to redeem their frequent flier miles.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
